Have you ever imagined yourself, visiting a major museum, walking through the walls, filled with forgotten African artifacts, ready to return them to the house they deserve? No? Well, thanks to South African video game studio Nyamakop, you will have a chance soon.
Earlier this month Restarta side scrolling puzzle platform game – Think early tomb Raider or The Persian Prince Game – Players join the crew of Robin Hood-style thief, staged a sophisticated robbery, taking stolen artifacts from Western Museums and returning them to the people they were taken away.
As Nyamakop listed on the online video game market epic games, Restart In the near future, “the political power of the Transatlantic Return Treaty is expected to repay the museum’s African artifacts.” But the obstacle in the treaty is that it only applies to artifacts on “public displays,” which leads the museum to circumvent demands by placing these works into a highly protected private collection. This is where the player comes in: draw out a given facility, carefully build the exit route, and of course steal the artifact and escape.
As game creative director Ben Myres explains epic In the news posts, all artifacts Restart Real-world works based on Western museums. While developing various tasks, the developer team spent two years researching narrowing down the list, including hundreds of works that are still held by Western museums that can be managed.
“We looked for artifacts with great stories in terms of how we plundered it,” he said. “Why are they important to people? Anything related to them.”
By explanation, Myres points out the Ngadji drum, a wooden drum made by the people of Pokomo in Kenya, asking for worship or celebration of the beginning of the king’s rule. It was confiscated by the British in 1902, and since then, despite efforts by Kenyan researchers to restore the work, it has since remained in the British Museum’s collection.
“The first Kenyans to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s,” Meyer said. “The people who saw the drums were descendants of the kings, and were taken from the original. So these are not artifacts just discovered in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These are still active cultures.”
According to Myre, each artifact in the game is faithfully rendered into the 3D model based on available photos or scans, given that many artifacts are inaccessible and have been stored for a long time.
But while the artifact is based on real objects, the museum in the game is not.
Nyamakop is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the developer team includes people from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Restart It’s the second game in the studio; the first one is AppearanceThis is a 2018 game that became the first original IP to be developed in Africa released on Nintendo consoles. According to its website, it is one of the largest independent game developers in sub-Saharan Africa.
“There aren’t a lot of opportunities for people here to make video games professionally,” Myers said. “So if you’re here to give people this opportunity, it happens to be something that is African-style (you don’t see a lot in the game), and people are very excited about doing it.
Restart A release date has not been announced yet, but the rendering of its gameplay can be seen in its announced trailer:
